Quick Look: AMD Radeon RX 480—bang for the buck giant slayer?

If you thought the Nvidia GTX 1080 and 1070 were impressive, then behold the AMD Radeon RX 480—a normal-looking card that should again hold true the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover.” It carries some of the design cues of the Fury and Fury X flagships, including the dotted shroud and Radeon typeface. It also sports a blower style cooling solution on its face, the PCIE fingers at the bottom, and DisplayPort 1.3/1.4, HDMI 2.0b, and exhaust grille at the side. The top carries the lone 6-pin connector to fulfil the card’s 150 W power requirement.

You read that right. 150 W is all it takes to run this puppy. It achieves this thanks to the new Polaris architecture and new 14 nm FinFET manufacturing process allowing it to be more powerful than the mid-range R9 380 while sipping less power. Though details are pretty thin as of the moment, we can confirm that the RX 480 will arrive with 36 compute units; 256 GB/s of memory bandwidth; 4/8 GB GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus; and support for AMD FreeSync technology. In an Ashes of the Singularity benchmark, two RX 480s were able to edge a lone GTX 1080 62.5 to 58.7 fps, with prices of less than USD 500 and USD 700 respectively.

The specs should also allow the card to easily handle VR which it was made for. Currently, you can only get a proper (as in not your smartphone attached to a Google Cardboard or some similar accessory) virtual reality experience with a GPU that’s around the USD 500 mark. The RX 480, on the other hand, promises flawless VR and overall performance at a price of—drum roll please…

USD 199—around the same price as current mid-range cards but with significantly more oomph.

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Technology is constantly marching forward. The industry continues to innovate and provide smarter solutions to improve our way of life, and we can easily see it now on our smartphones, computers and laptops, and even smart home devices. We may know what the future holds, but we can always predict what is yet to come in the world of tech.

For our CoverStory this month, we share the future technologies that we may soon find on smartphones, laptops and computers, and smart home devices. Our team also had a chance to drive the Mitsubishi Strada GLX AT and put the ASUS ROG Zephyrus S, LG XBOOM PK 5, Fujifilm instax mini LiPlay, Realme C2, and Oppo Reno 10X Zoom to the test. We also had a blast playing World of Warcraft: Classic, testing the gaming capabilities of Oppo Reno 10X Zoom, and experiencing the Japanese AR game Hado. We also got to sit down with Lenovo Philippines’ country manager Michael Ngan to hear about his secrets in leading the company in the Philippines.

Gracing our cover is the latest iteration of Isuzu’s best-selling workhorse, the Isuzu D-MAX LS AT, which is engineered for tougher and bolder journeys.

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